Category Archives: Humour

Indian Traffic – An Illustrated Guide

You break it, you buy the farm

Breaking these rules have a high probability of death or serious injury to self or car

1/ Stop at a red light, especially when there is cross traffic.

Dangerous, but it will never happen to me

Breaking these rules can cause death or serious injury but the event carries a low probability

2/ Wearing a seat belt in the front seat
3/ Not driving on the wrong side of a divided highway even if the U turn is more than 20 m. away

Dangerous to others (but not to self, although a car wash may be necessary)

4/ Stopping at Stop signs
5/ Stopping at pedestrian crossings (instead of speeding up) even when some pedestrians start sprinting across

Who’s going to catch me?

Pesky rules that are unnecessary. Break them if you can get away with it.

6/ Not using your cellphone without handsfree, especially when a cop is present.

These rules are a nuisance! (thank God there is no enforcement!)

7/ Using your horn only when necessary

Much of Driver Behaviour is not governed by Traffic Rules. But even there there is behavior that is rational, and behavior that is not.

8/ Praying to the gods to keep you safe before (or while) breaking rules 2 to 6.
9/ Leaning on your horn a few seconds before the light turns green.

Of Leaking Electricity

My Dad's wiring!
Have you noticed how in India if you visit your friends or family, you always need their help to turn the TV or computer on in the morning? Why? Because it is too darned complicated. For instance, to turn on the computer you may need to switch on some or all of the following:

- Wall socket
- UPS
- Power strip
- Second wall socket (because the power strip doesn’t have enough outlets)
- Computer
- Monitor

Yesterday I was being brave at my parents’ house and decided to try turning on the computer myself. I went down the checklist and turned on the computer, but the broadband modem wouldn’t turn on. After many minutes of jiggling wires and testing for loose connections I finally discovered this small button on the back panel of the modem – another switch – and of course it had been switched off.

Its almost as if we revel in taking something simple like switching on the TV and and making a sacred ritual out of it – a complicated series of actions which cannot be executed without rigorous training and is designed to obfuscate outsiders.

I used to find this exasperating until I got interested in clean tech last year. It turns out that the Indian approach to turning off power to appliances that are idle actually does save electricity. It probably also extends the life of the appliances, though I haven’t read any research on that.

In the US on the other hand, there is almost no attention paid to what is called “standby power” – the power consumption by appliances, especially modern, intelligent electronic appliances, when they are idle but not turned off. Standby power is a big source of lost energy. Lawrence Berkeley Labs has a website dedicated to educating the public about standby power. According to them, a typical American home spends as much as 10% of its power consumption on standby power.

Typical American attitudes to switching off stuff are that they a) don’t want to be bothered about it and b) find it funny when someone does it. As far back as 1933, James Thurber, in one of my favorite funny books, My Life and Hard Times, describes his mother’s paranoia

… mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.

because of which she would go around turning switches off all over the house even if there was nothing plugged into them.

I suspect most Indians won’t find this funny. Switching off stuff comes naturally to them. And if a good percentage of them don’t know that electric current doesn’t flow unless the circuit is completed, that’s natural. The other thing that is “piped” into the home is water and that drips all the time.

On the other hand, I don’t know if too many Americans find this funny either. If two thirds of them believe that Obama is a Muslim and a whole bunch of others hold these kooky beliefs I think there must be a lot of people like Thurber’s mother out there.

The Best Names are Gult Names

Gaurav Rastogi has a very interesting take on the inadequacies of human naming conventions.

A naming convention designed for a planet with 100 million people (as on 500 BCE) is hopelessly useless in the world where the number of people to be named has expanded 70-fold. What was designed to be a unique identifier (viz. “Gaurav”, son of the “Rastogi” family) is no longer unique now. By my reckoning, there must be another 5-600 people called “Gaurav Rastogi”, and another 5-10,000 people called “Amit Garg”. Living. Today. Waiting for their unique names.

I completely concur that this is a problem that needs a modern day solution. Many an email has been sent to the wrong Gaurav Rastogi or S. Raghavan. Sometimes, said Raghavan may not even be in the company. When said Raghavan got my second email meant for the internal Raghavan, he said something like “You think I left the company just to keep getting your stinking emails?!” Continue reading →

The Broader Context of Swatting Flies

obama-could-hurt-a-fly-the-caucus-blog-nytimescomA couple of weeks back, President Obama swatted a fly in the White House. It did not go unnoticed in the media. Since this blog is about global trends, it would be remiss if I didn’t cover this important event and put it in the context of fly-swatting around the world.

The President is clearly a fit man with great reflexes. During the election campaign he sank a three pointer on demand for the camera which earned him my everlasting admiration. This time he swatted a fly that was bothering him during an interview in the White House. Nailing a fly is never easy, however, I am somewhat skeptical about the bona fides of the White House fly. Was it a house fly? If so, is it possible that the North American house fly is an entirely different species from the flies that I grew up with in India? They do look somewhat fat and happy over here, compared to the lean, mean third world variety. I don’t believe – and I say this from considerable experience – that a human being can swat one of those Indian flies with their hands. With a fly swatter, maybe, but not your bare hands. I mean no disrespect to the Prez, but that fly was not the real thing. Continue reading →

Best Practices in Voter Bribery

Indian Rupee NoteIndia’s general elections are around the corner. As you know, the most important factor that determines the outcome of our elections is money – how much and how it is spent – in the crucial electoral process of buying votes.

The amount of money spent is, of course, a key determinant of electoral victory. We will cover that in a later article on Corruption and Campaign Finance. In this article we will discuss the state of the art in actually getting the bribes into the hands of the voters. Continue reading →

My 2008 Wish “Less”

A very happy new year to all my readers. May you and your loved ones have a joyful 2008.

Wish lists are neat things. Unlike new year resolutions, they involve no effort on your part. And unlike predictions for the new year, you can’t be wrong about them. So I thought I would draw up a wish list and share it with my readers. Perhaps they could then add their own candidates for the wish list and then we could have a reality TV show where people from around India SMS (at premium rates) their wish list candidates and a panel of distinguished judges help us short list ten WLCs (Wish List Candidates) which we then take to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who tells us that he can do nothing about them unless Prakash Karat and Sonia Gandhi agree on each one of them.

Seemed like an exercise in futility so I decided not to do a wish list. Instead here is a “Wish Less”. It is based upon the premise that we already have too much of everything. Continue reading →

I Hope You are Enjoying This!

I normally don’t post links if I don’t have anything to add to the matter. But this one is just so funny that I will.

Business Standard’s Kishore Singh wrote a review (here) of a book called “Entry From Backside Only” by Binoo John. An excerpt from the review

Now I am growing up in too many small places as Father is on transfer, and so I am not khit-pit in English in weigh these hi-fi people in Bombay and Delhi our, but I am knowing that this Mr John, he is kraking these jokes about small town people who are not so well knowing the language. At first, I am enjoying and laufing and saying, Oh, this Mr John, he is telling good-good jokes. But then he is saying that this is not write way to right English, and that this is Indian-English, which is not true English, and I am thinking perhaps he is CIA foreign hand, he is wishing to disallocate this great country.

Need I say more? If you grew up in India, go read the review, it’ll cheer you up.

I salute Kishore Singh. I wish I could write like that!